I find it eerily strange. Alien even. Why a conscious mind would let another control it. Tell it what to wear, what not to wear. Tell it what they can say and not say. Tell it what and when they can eat and not eat. Tell it what it can think and not think.

To me, there is nothing more beautiful in my consciousness than the ability to think freely. To be wrong, to discover, to learn, to try and understand for myself. To find beauty through my own eyes rather than through a set of polarised glasses prescribed to me by some abstract idea. I refuse to have my life and lifestyle enslaved and shackled by superstition and have people who manipulate me with it.

“Only the illiterate smoke. Because every box of cigarette and tobacco products have warning labels. Smokers must not know how to read.”, my mum once told me. Today, we get gory pictures of cigarette boxes. We still get smokers. So it’s not because some people refuse to read, it is because some people refuse to open their eyes.

C’est la vie. It is your life. I only take offence when I see people being oppressed and not realise it. I guess it would be the same feeling that one gets talking to a happy slave who loves to be a slave. You can keep telling them that slavery is wrong but they are happy in it and constantly invites you to join them.

More than half the people in Malaysia have already lost their human rights. The other half have theirs under threat. The struggle for secularism in government should not be taken lightly. Even if you are a Bishop, a high priest, an Imam, an agnostic or a hard-headed Atheist, no one can differentiate our tears. We need the freedom to be who we want to be, when we want to be. This goes beyond freedom of speech, it’s freedom to think.